It can also mitigate the tendency for a researcher to impose their own discourse and meaning onto the text. For example when talking about how their bedroom looks, someone might talk about ‘mess’, ‘chaos’, or ‘disorganised’ and their specific choice of word may be revealing about their personality and embarrassment. In vivo coding doesn’t just apply to metaphor or emotions, and can keep researchers close to the language that respondents themselves are using. This is especially useful when metaphors like this are commonly used, or someone uses an especially vivid turn of phrase. For example someone might say ‘It felt like I was hit by a bus’ to describe their shock at the event, and rather than creating a topic/node/category/Quirk for ‘shock’, the researcher will name it ‘hit by a bus’. However, with in vivo coding, a researcher will create a coding category based on a key phrase or word used by a participant. In an older article I did talk about having a category for ‘key quotes’ - those beautiful times when a respondent articulates something perfectly, and you know that quote is going to appear in an article, or even be the article title. This is sometimes called “in vivo” coding, from the Latin ‘in life’ and not to be confused with the ubiquitous qualitative analysis software ‘ Nvivo’ which can be used for any type of coding, not just in vivo! Following on from the last blog post on creating weird and wonderful categories to code your qualitative data, I want to talk about an often overlooked way of creating coding topics – using direct quotes from participants to name codes or topics.

Nvivo coding example